Sunday, May 21, 2006

Neo-conservative watch

This is what Andrew Moravcsik has to say about Jeremy Rabkin warning in The Case for Sovereignty about 'the European threat':

Rabkin is not a conservative so much as a legal reactionary.
He believes that the American federal government should be scaled back to
its role in 1930, before the new deal decisively expanded its domestic role.
He would have the US government return to an exclusive focus on national
defence, trade policy and a few infrastructural activities. The federal government,
Rabkin has written in detail elsewhere, has no business regulating the environment
or social policy. Over the past century, in his view, the supreme court has
betrayed the traditional American anti-statist ideal.

It is because international norms might impede this process of reaction that
Rabkin so viscerally opposes them. This is why he is so selective in his
criticism. Free trade and defence alliances, he believes, do not threaten
sovereignty—even though they unambiguously restrict the legal and political
autonomy of nations. Rabkin has only positive things to say about Nato, as
well as traditional Gatt/WTO trade liberalisation. Only "left-wing" policies,
in Rabkin's view, restrict sovereignty. Thus he viciously criticises the
WTO appellate body's recent efforts to regulate the relationship between
free trade and environmental policy.

In the end Rabkin all but admits that it is not Europeans he fears. It is
other Americans—Americans who do not share his libertarianism.

From Prospect magazine.
Rabkin is 'a former protégé of John Bolton's at the American
Enterprise Institute. The book comes splashed with effusive praise by leading
conservative intellectuals such as Robert Bork, Robert Kagan, and George
Will'.